News

An HBO documentary about the arrest, trial and sentencing of Pussy Riot is airing this summer and presents a Western view of the case. I was shocked by what I saw and heard, finding my own reactions quite mixed, as I viewed Pussy Riot from two different sensibilities -- the Russian and the Western.

Assistant Professor of Theatre and Women and Gender Studies faculty member Meghan Brodie just finished collaborating with translators Annie & Karl Bortnick on the English translation of Germaine Tillion's In the Underworld: A Darkly Comic Operetta, a play Tillion wrote while imprisoned in Ravensbruck, a WWII concentration camp in Germany.

This summer, USM professors James Messerschmidt (Criminology) and Wendy Chapkis (Sociology and Women & Gender Studies) were invited to be plenary speakers at the Center for Sex, Gender and Sexualities’ summer institute at Durham University in England.

Lucinda Cole is spending the summer finishing her book “Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1640-1700.” It’s about the importance of certain animal populations--rats, birds, fleas, dogs, and foxes--to science and literature during the Little Ice Age when, a drop in temperatures having created food insecurities across Europe, humans were regularly forced to compete with other animals for food.

Nancy Gish, Professor of English and Women & Gender Studies Council
member, organized and chaired two sessions on T. S. Eliot at the
American Literature Association in May; they included a paper on Djuna
Barnes's Nightwood, a brilliant modernist novel that addressed lesbian
life, and the sessions included women scholars from Israel and Italy.

Shelton Waldrep, Professor of English and Women & Gender Studies Affiliated Scholar, is working on a new book for which he has received a contract from Bloomsbury. Entitled "Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie" this study is an attempt at a much-overdue intervention into our understanding of David Bowie and his multifaceted influence on a number of media and art forms.

During her year-long sabbatical, Women and Gender Studies & Economics Professor, Susan Feiner is writing a book with the working title "Grave Robbers, Inc: the Insatiable Appetite of the Senior Housing/Assisted Living Industry."

NANCY GISH, professor of English and founding Director of the USM Women and Gender Studies Program, was recognized by her peers on the Women and Gender Studies Council with an award named in her honor. The Nancy K. Gish Award for Excellence in Feminist Social, Intellectual, Political, or Cultural Practice was dedicated as such for Gish's work as a sustaining force of feminist academics and engagement on campus, in the community, and in the world.